Michael Haneke has long been known as a master of menace. From the shocking psycho-drama of Benny's Video through the audience-baiting horrors of Funny Games to the creeping unease of Hidden, Haneke has earned himself a matchless reputation as a deadpan agent provocateur. In The White Ribbon (2009, Artificial Eye, 15), the Austrian writer-director distils the negative energy of all his previous work into a sublimely understated exercise in anxiety. Set in pre-first world war northern Germany, this black-and-white Palme d'Or winner posits a series of quietly threatening incidents which revolve around the children of a small village. Echoing Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned, Haneke depicts a generation who hold the seeds of catastrophe in their young hands – these are, after all, the children who will grow up to lead Germany through its darkest days. Yet The White Ribbon is never explicit, leaving the viewer to imagine the worst atrocities to which its fleeting narrative alludes. As the British censors' report notes, while being "restrained in its visual detail", the film contains several scenes which are "potentially powerful and harrowing in effect". That's putting it mildly.

A worldwide critical hit, The White Ribbon was a worthy nominee at this year's Academy Awards. Yet there were the usual Oscar oversights, none more grievous than Fred Melamed's absence from the best supporting actor nominations. His superbly slimy turn as sanctimonious philanderer Sy Ableman was not only the best thing about A Serious Man (2009, Universal, 15) but also one of the scary-comic highlights of the year. As the hangdog-faced horror with a fondness for insincere hugs, Melamed plays the dark heart of the Coens' jet-black comedy with aplomb. Oh sure, Michael Stuhlbarg is terrific as Larry Gopnik, the schlub who responds to the collapse of his life, job, reputation and marriage by impotently whining: "But I didn't do anything" (an echo of Dante's stuck-record whinge, "I'm not even supposed to be here", from Clerks?). But its Melamed's goggle-eyed stare, along with his fabulously deadpan monotone dirge, which will stay with you and haunt your dreams.

Too little seen upon its theatrical release (despite a few rave reviews), Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's Johnny Mad Dog (2008, Momentum, 15) deserves to find a place on every DVD shelf. Using a cast of young players, many of whom experienced the traumas of child soldiery first-hand in Liberia, this astonishingly powerful drama journeys into the dark heart of an unspecified African civil war. Christophe Minie is electrifying as the titular lieutenant, helplessly repeating the pattern of brutalisation and psychosis which begins with youngsters being forced to kill their own parents and ends in a drug-addled belief in their own indestructibility. While the subject matter may be terrifyingly grim, Sauvaire (who worked hard to protect and nurture his cast) directs with a vivid flair which raises this high above the level of mere docudrama. Nods to the visual style of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange – particularly in the young soldiers' violently deranged garb – and the kinetic street-level suss of City of God make this a genuinely riveting experience. Bravo!

Having defined and popularised the "rom-zom-com" genre, Britain's Shaun of the Dead proved a hard act to follow. While splatterstick humour may look queasily easy, it's damn near impossible to get the right balance between goofy gore and emotional engagement, as demonstrated by a string of dismal, derivative imitators. The publicity for Zombieland (2009, Sony, 15), which essentially transposes Shaun's downbeat British riffs to the States, boasts that this is "The No 1 Grossing Zombie Movie in History", although the Internet Movie Database confirms only that is "the highest grossing movie in the US to begin with the letter 'Z'''. Whatever, director Ruben Fleischer's knockabout romp is plenty of fun, as fearful nerd Jesse Eisenberg teams up with a gun-toting, Twinkie-eating Woody Harrelson in a near-future when the dead walk the earth. The offal flies in all directions, but (as with Edgar Wright's homegrown gem, Shaun) it's the believable relationships between the central characters which provoke both the laughs and the screams. One word of warning – if you don't already know who the celebrity cameo star is, then make sure you don't find out before watching the movie. The shock really is half the fun.

Less fun altogether is The Fourth Kind (2009, Entertainment, 15), a duplicitous sci-fi frightener which attempts to scare the audience by insisting that what they are watching is real. This in itself is no great crime – that matchless shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre began with the solemn declaration that: "the events you are about to witness are true", even though the true story of Ed Gein didn't happen in Texas, didn't involve a chainsaw and wasn't a massacre. Other enjoyable "real-life" hoaxes range from The Last Movie to The Blair Witch Project to Fargo, but unlike its predecessors The Fourth Kind has nothing but "the truth" with which to dazzle us. To this end, director Olatunde Osunsanmi presents split-screen footage of Milla Jovovich recreating freaky alien abduction interviews alongside the allegedly real videotaped sessions. Sadly, the "real" footage looks even more creakily staged than the dramatisations, with baloney levels reaching critical mass before the opening credits are over. Townsfolk from the real-life Nome, Alaska, have slammed the movie as "insensitive to family members of people who have gone missing in Nome over the years", but the film's real crime is being very silly and not in the least bit scary.